In the late afternoon I walked down to the square. I’ve been indoors now every day of eight weeks. People were sitting round the edge of the grass as though it were a swimming pool they were dangling their legs into. The trees overhead are finally thickening with green. A man who doesn’t have much […]
Self-quarantine day 10. Me and two other neighbours ran into each other in our pyjamas down by the bins and stood in a broad triangle, laughing helplessly at ourselves as the grey sun struggled to come out overhead. In Berlin we have been indoors since early November. “Does my guitar playing bother you through the […]
In Berlin this early in the quarantine it’s ok, the sun is out and I would love to be out in it, I imagine people here might be finding it daunting at the end of a long low skied winter to have to stay indoors for longer. Seems to be one of those instances (unlike, […]
Across town today I had the impulse to come through an overgrown island of trees that surrounds a church, and went wheeling my bike along its narrow, littered path where, if I tuned out the traffic, I could feel as though I were walking through a tiny woods. Someone is living there and had stacked […]
I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought […]
Last year and the year before that and four years ago too we went down on the train to West Germany, to a tiny village lying under the skirts of the old woods. This is where my sweetheart was born. His father was born in the same house and to me the village, the house, […]
Reaching my Kiez in the late afternoon* I nearly ran into a boy-girl couple kissing strenuously outside the Turkish supermarket. This supermarket annoys me because they always reel off too many plastic bags and I have seen a man who had put his single apple into one bag accept another bag to carry it home […]
You know you’re in Germany when you can saunter into a department store carrying your dog on a leash. The dog accompanies you up the escalator, looking longingly across at the fluffy bunnies quivering in their mesh cages down in the pet department. When the dog starts barking and kicks up a fuss in the […]
The hottest bath imaginable. Coconut oiled my hair. Wrapped head to hip in towels. New book and early to bed, ahhh thank you blissful alone time. I can hear people on the street outside cobbling and shouting, gearing up for their Friday night, and it just seems to drift by like leaves on the wind. […]
Miserable with flu I staggered down to the markets in search of star anise, lemons, and fresh coriander. There was a golden-lit stall with a radio blaring which sells raclette, a stinky, melty, fondue-like cheese, and “hot apple punch.” Hot apple punch! Irresistible. I came round the front of the stall and presented myself; moments […]
So on December 4th I stripped myself out of the hammock tied under a tree that is no longer there, and put on a Santa suit and biker boots, and we went out to the airport in Brisbane and got on a plane. We left summer and got here to Berlin in winter, it never […]
In my dream I was in this amazing cafe taking five floors of an abandoned building in Brisbane. Right at the top was a little terrace looking out only on treetops. There was a waitress dressed up in a robot suit she could not see out of which blinded her from doing her work, she […]
I walked into one of those joyless lunchtime buffets so ill-suited to Chinese cuisine. The name of the place was China-Haus, China-Garten, something like that. They had long ranks of bains marie, tepid with cornflour. Another woman came in behind me, rather young with a lot of glossy hair spilling over her parka, and stood […]
Today I was writing in a cafe and when I pulled out my laptop to transcribe out of a messy notebook the woman next to me got up and slid between our tables, saying something over her shoulder under her breath. “I’ve just come from the office…” I was wondering why she would feel so […]
Oh, I love my little desk in my little borrowed room. At night the night is all around and silent, absolutely silent unless you hear the unending majestic progress as if across tundra after tundra of the wind. This desk is surrounded on all sides by literal towers of the possessions of the host who’s […]
We are travelling with a medium-sized hound named Felix and tonight I learned something uncanny about him. There is a bowl of walnuts on the low coffee table by the horde of tealight candles, santa-shaped geegaws, and slinky Christmas lights. The adult son of the house picked up a walnut. “Now watch,” he instructed, and […]
All my life people have been telling me not to get too excited about things. They say, “I don’t want you to be disappointed.” And the truth is the thing I have so vehemently looked forward to almost never resembles the picture I have built in my mind. It’s often disappointing. But it feels like […]
Tiny revolutions in other people’s lives, I just can’t stop making them. When we got here and had eaten our first meal together I said to our hostess, No, I’ll wash up. Because as everybody knows, it’s not on for the person who cooks to wash up as well. I made sure to say it […]
Christmas edition of the local paper, West Germany. Four pages of articles welcoming the first couple of hundred asylum seekers into the area. Photos of Syrian and Pakistani families lugging their suitcases off the bus and of all the local dignitaries who turned out to smilingly shake their hands and welcome them; photos of the […]